


monkey-wrenched circuitry

by orphan_account



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Atlas CEO Rhys, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 19:39:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18723637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A few vodka martinis are all it takes for Katagawa to look less like the ghost of traumas past and more like a good idea.





	monkey-wrenched circuitry

**Author's Note:**

> what up it's me here to sully the brand spanking new katagawa tag with honest to goodness horseshit

Katagawa salivates after Rhys like a skag starved its of dinner. And who could blame him? Under Rhys' dominion, Atlas is reworking history. His dual master's, the way he leapfrogged into a position within Hyperion's interim management straight out of college, the cybernetic innovations fused to his bones (hell, even the _vault)_ feel like some other lifetime, not some major coup. Lorelei tells her four time major general that his blind ambition will guarantee him an early grave. But like all esteemed villains, Rhys has no intention of sleeping when he's dead.

Jack came to Rhys like the devil in dramatic fits of blue. Katagawa comes to him like an angel: window-dressed in a white suit and haloed by the low light that fulgurates around the city’s sweep at dusk. It's not the white of clean hands, of doves and picket fences. It's the sort of white you can't ease up around. The colour of bared canines, of dress shirts and field hospital beds. (Rhys' first act as CEO was to have Atlas' walls painted magnolia.)

He wears his hair about his shoulders and the appellative like an expensive offworld eau de cologne. Rhys thinks nothing of it until Maliwan heads a board meeting wearing three inch heels and a haircut that Rhys had loved once upon a time. Rhys is struck by the advent of diagonal halves of the ilk of other corporate monstrosities, the kind with ciphers and sources for skin.

Under the conference table, Rhys prickles all over as Katagawa's insistent fingers hover above his thigh. He takes notes with his other hand and Rhys is captivated by its steadiness. Their business partners are distracted by one of Rhys’ overpaid suits and his numbers. He smile is wolfish, a dare to strike. So, Rhys delivers his fountain pen into the meat of Katagawa’s hand. Nobody has touched him since the fall and untouched he will remain. Katagawa drips fervidly over Rhys' complicated carpets. His mouth is fox-wide as he weighs up the challenge.

"Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me," Rhys says as he rises and dusts off his bloody pants. He's nothing short of disgusted if not impressed by his initiative. Rhys attends meetings across an ECHO feed from thereon out.

Back home, the merger keeps Rhys up like the eight sugars in his coffee. Meanwhile, Katagawa clouds his vision. His head feels like the banks of a bulging river as his inbox floods with Katagawa's nineteen ECHO messages an hour. Rhys sends him an ultimatum but they exchange ECHOs like sharks, then darlings. Pitting two carnivores like Maliwan and Atlas against each other is an exercise in financial loss. Pooling parties would ensure enough bodies to keep pace with the COV's proliferating family. Together, they could procure two million teeth and two million more.

It's by virtue of a legacy. Rhys can't determine whether it belong to him, to Atlas or the autocrat he packs up in his briefcase. Either way, Lady Luck has him at her beck and call. That's why when Katagawa calls Rhys up to the Zanara to discuss their options, he walks straight into her trapdoor mouth and rolls the dice. Her lights are on high and Katagawa's licentious manner moves in stealth like an undercurrent of anxiety. At first, he's a proper gentleman and a proper diplomat. Clear, serious drinks are what Katagawa's high-flying affiliates in Epitah and Eunomia like (and by extension, Rhys.) A few vodka martinis are all it takes for Katagawa to look less like the ghost of traumas past and more like a good idea.

"You're serious?" Rhys asks with none of his usual pretence. Katagawa's eyes roam from his lips to his collar button and back again. They're as brown and careful as a school of business but they won't be the next time Rhys looks into them.

"Always. Are you in or are you out?" Katagawa asks the question like he already knows the answer. It's a clincher, a final offer. There's a smile on his face that is too familiar, too vulpine, too far removed. Rhys can not identify why he wants to lay himself bare, to let Maliwan bed its roots in places so chasmic they sleep within the earth. Katagawa is a man with flesh and blood hands. Not the disembodied fingers of the ghost that pulls strings behind his eyelids. Katagawa could asphyxiate him if he wanted to. 

Rhys traces the pit in the back of his hand with the whorl of his thumb. "I'm in," he says.

To be more specific, it takes a few vodka martinis and twenty detached minutes in Katagawa's private suite. Katagawa leaves with the corners of his mouth stapled to his cheekbones having secured an asset. The flesh around Rhys' port creeps.

The girl at the front desk takes Rhys for a legend. It seems Katagawa's odd preoccupation with him is contagious. Rhys forgot her name around an hour ago. Jack's had been a nice enough girl named Meg. Rhys holds onto her name like a bloody bar of soap. He had taken it upon himself to commit to memory the name of every person Jack smoked when he was still trying to be better. Rhys helps himself to a fat mint from the bowl on the desk but it doesn't stop Katagawa from forming in a layer across his teeth. She flashes her bleach whites at him as she hands him a concrete block of paperwork. Rhys takes one look at the fine print and leaves an empty space in lieu of his wax seal.

Katagawa fancies himself an epicure and Rhys indulges him. Fine dining him feels narcissistic, like making engagements with a lesser self. An exercise in ego (or self loathing.) Rhys does it anyway. They split every kickshaw and complicated canape on Promethea's bloody streets, the kind her nonpareils would swallow whilst their best men lay dying. When Rhys is enervated by appearances, he'll talk Junior through Fran's fruity repertoire. Rhys isn't sure that this is what Jack had meant when he said the quickest route to a man's heart was through his guts.

Meridian's hubs are named after unpopular heroes of unpopular wars. Rhys thinks of Athena as they take coffee in a plaza christened after the man that lay waste to her future. (Or so she thought. She makes easy money teaching Fiona how to hunt. And at the end of a long day, she goes home to her wife.) Rhys feels lonesome. That is until Katagawa feeds him lies and strawberries dipped in finest Eunomian chocolate and they take Rhys’ gilded elevator up to the penthouse.

"This is a first rate penthouse," Katagawa says with a realtor’s metre once they're inside fully. "Just wait until you see mine. You will gut this place and have one just like it. Don't worry. As soon as we shake hands, I'll set about it."

"Shut up," Rhys says, stepping out of his leather shoes, puffed out like a peacock. It's one of Jack's hallmarks that he has all wrong (not that anybody would know.) They drink scotch on the rocks and when Rhys allows himself to collapse in the arms of Katagawa's vision, he doesn't ask. Still, he asks too many questions. Like a broadsheet journalist or a superfan (the kind that would stretch his skin across his bones and wear him like a suit.) Rhys feels like a vivisected frog. Then, three drinks past trickery, he takes to the fruity numbers, the kind with pink piths and chocolate sprinkles that he and Yvette used to split come payday.

Alcohol makes him loose and irritable and causes the temperature in the room to rise by a degree or two. It's then that Rhys realises he wants company. (Not Katagawa's though he's a close second.) The way Katagawa talks makes it sound like it doesn't matter a jot what Rhys wants and Rhys can't place why that makes his heart beat so violently.

Rhys' favourite cocktail shaker is imported from a double digit Eden. (His honest-to-goodness favourite was the one that Vaughn had bought him to toast his twenty-fifth.) It is stained around the edges betraying his close relationship with drinks of its calibre. Rhys has a maid service twice a week but he doesn't allow them into his liquor cabinet. Rhys can afford a new one. He could buy a million cocktail shakers if he so desired. After all, he has a black card, stock shares in Pangolin and Hyperion, a private suite in every hotel in the galaxy and holiday homes on Hermes and Aquator.

"You remind me of somebody I used to know," Rhys says, drunkenly, stupidly.

"Yeah?" Katagawa asks, masticating on his olive. He watches Rhys instead of listening to his words and Rhys doesn't like that. His expression is stretched over the topography of his face like a mask. "Take the tie off."

Denying Katagawa is like denying Jack and denying Jack is like denying his body gravity. It is easy to forget that Jack wasn't a person, that he was a string, a set of ones and zeros. Jack didn't sweat. He didn't have weak spots, he wasn't liable to break. Sometimes Rhys feels not even death can separate them. He can feel his weight in his bed at night like a sick, voyeuristic bodach that watches as he strokes himself beneath the sheets. Katagawa isn’t at all like Jack. He’s a cheap imitation. He’s a virus, trying to work his way past Rhys' defences and shut him down quietly. But Rhys will settle.

They'll consolidate each other's hangups eventually. Katagawa will tell Rhys about his father and his eleven siblings and his Madonna–whore complex, still inside him, and Rhys will pretend he is someone else. He'll tell Rhys it is a simple matter of moving capital, that he'll get a good return. For now, Rhys simply swallows the rest of his drink along with his pride and sits down with him at the bed. Katagawa watches Rhys' fingers work as he unbuttons his shirt. He takes in the large tattoo that occupies his torso, drags a fingernail along the wave of freckles between the ocean of his shoulders. When he caresses the ECHOeye that Rhys wears about his neck like an albatross, Rhys slaps his hand away.

"That's a funny looking necklace, buddy," Katagawa says. Then, with a hand on his arm, "silver is my favourite colour, you know. I find gold to be too ostentatious."

Rhys warns him this is not a surrender as he lolls on his back and exposes his underbelly to his greedy mouth. They fuck a little slowly. A little cruelly. Rhys can tolerate being bitten anyplace except his neck so Katagawa sinks his teeth into him like a cat. Rhys misses Jack so much that he can't breathe. He wishes those were Jack's fingers coiled around his neck, his breath hot against the shell of his ear, his terrible schemes and his grand ideas. Rhys feels hollow.

Katagawa comes as he rambles on about the merger and his rant barely slows to a crawl as his body jerks then settles. A sickness claws it way up Rhys' spine and pools in the soles of his feet. Katagawa pulls out and presses himself between Rhys' legs, until Rhys can feel his plan against his thighs, inside of him, the elemental burning him from the inside out.

He wakes up with the mother of all headaches and Katagawa warming his bed like a horse's head. He’s laid out like a corpse, fingers aloft, forming a sharp steeple atop his chest. The night comes back all at once like a slap to the face. Katagawa stares wide-eyed like a child at the outstretched arms of Meridian's posts. She remains the way they left her before they fell asleep, with the brightness turned up, burning with a red light.

Rhys pushes his palm into his eye socket then roots around in his drawer for Atlas' best pain relievers. In their tiny apartment up on Helios, Vaughn had kept a janky key in their bedside cabinet. It had been a manual reset of sorts. Nowadays, his migraines are as quotidian as his business operations. Moreso since Katagawa began his subtle takeover of the company (and Rhys' body.)

He tugs on his shorts and his monogrammed robe and they smoke Hestian cigars on his balcony even though Rhys shouldn't. His body has slowly been giving up on him since he tore half of it out like a bad tooth. Rhys would do it over if he had to. But it isn't a matter of simply pulling Katagawa out of his head. The quiet air of the morning whips around them. Promethea boasts less gravity than Pandora but Rhys feels heavier than ever.

Katagawa reminds him of himself in a roundabout way. Smug, vain, ambitious and ruthlessly efficient. When Rhys falls, it come it as no surprise. He looks enough like him to be exactly his type. Katagawa has the presence of a bomb but bombs are more tolerable when their agenda of wholesale slaughter is quieter and cleaner.

He thought he was getting better at falling in love with the right sort of people. People like Sasha. People he could take home to his mother. Last he heard, she and August were making breakfast sandwiches for a living in a greasy spoon of their own, and she was sporting a bump the size of Elpis. (He keeps the postcards she sends him tucked away in the top drawer of his desk.)  
  
When Katagawa reaches over to brush Rhys' hair out of his eyes, he grabs at his wrist. From a distance, it would look like a caress but the reality is that Rhys is sick of his pulse.

"This is wrong," Rhys tells him. "We shouldn't be doing this.”

"There’s no need to ascribe meaning to it. Two powerhouses helping each other out, that's all this is," Katagawa says. "This is a mutually beneficial arrangement."

They're quiet, then. Not pensive. Just unconversational. Eventually Katagawa gives up and heads back to the door. Rhys thanks the god he doesn't believe in for small mercies. The last thing his rock bottom needs is positive, upward stokes. But it's too late. Katagawa's venom already courses through him. It's only a matter of time.

After three days of radio silence, they take their breakfast in some tucked away coffee shop. Part of him had hoped that Katagawa had died, that he no longer had to sleep with a knife beneath his pillow. But he returns with a metallic umber straight from the bottle, a new tattoo, a golden eye and a port jutting out of his temple like a proud, ugly tumour. Junior wears it like a crown. What took Hyperion weeks takes Maliwan a matter of hours. It's not fair. It's not organic. He never bled for it like Rhys did.

After the surgery, Rhys had forgotten how to read. Yvette had colour-coded his calendar. It was her distant, micro-managerial way of showing she cared. Rhys can recollect it in vivid detail: the casual typefaces, the puerile emoticons that conveyed his feelings on a scale of one to ten and the nights spent on the kitchen floor spelling out his name with a magnetic alphabet and the hum of the refrigerator for company. (Later, Rhys will discover the vertical extent of the inquiries and the floor will buck beneath him. He'll hear how Katagawa plucked preliminaries from his head.)

Metamorphosing into Rhys seems as natural to Katagawa as breathing. Initially, it's with a subtlety Rhys always lacked. They don twin bespoke suits and silver cufflinks (though Katagawa's always fit a little different.) The materialistic part of him delights in it until he forges a modulator without without Rhys' permission. Katagawa uses it to unlock the door to his apartment. Weeks later, Rhys will find a microphone tacked to the underside of his desk like a piece of gum.

"It's in our best interest," he says with Rhys' voice and Jack's maniacal upswing. The dead eyes are a nice touch. "You'll see. Uniformity is important. We'll make one happy family." Rhys wants to tear the implant out with his teeth.

He'll tell himself that Atlas is a ticking time bomb. He'll tell Lorelei too and when she tells him to shut the fuck up, he feels Fiona's absence most profoundly. Last he saw her, she was wearing a lapel with a turn down collar that made her look deceptively urbane. Like a bonafide Vault Hunter. Fiona was always as fast as a Vladof and a better judge of character.

The insouciant bots are redolent of Helios, of Hyperion baristas and their crap coffee, hot-roasted with their spit. Rhys realises he is homesick for a place that was never really home. The two of them swap stories in detail, respective recollections differing so greatly in part yet lining up flawlessly in others. Their visions orient perfectly like Atlas' macrocosm. So, in spite of the unease that permeates every terrible hangover, Atlas and Maliwan unify with the force of a star erupting into existence.

They aren't enemies. They're not a team. They're not in a relationship. They're in several. Legally binding. Monetary. Sexual. Far too personal. All they are is a convenient coming together of two parties. Katagawa would sooner they would be one. Rhys hates how readily he gets attached to the monster. He should know better than to lose his heart to its skewed appendages.

They end up chained to one another. Katagawa uses manipulation as a battering chip. It's a transparent tactic and one Rhys knows well. Jack made gaps between the expensive things he owns: his collection of Eridian artefacts, his office in the clouds, Atlas' interplanetary coffee and his hand-stitched leather couch. Katagawa slithered in through the cracks and solidified like concrete. When Katagawa asks what Rhys thinks about when he closes his eyes, Rhys doesn't tell him the truth.

At night, Rhys leaves the door ajar so that the light spills in. When Katagawa spills in after, he apologises in advance with his business teeth and his easy smile. Rhys is sick with anticipation. When he tells him that the merger is eating him alive, all Katagawa can do is reassure him that it will be over soon. Rhys takes him by the collar. It is so stiff it doesn't resist, it doesn't come apart in his hands.

"I could bury you if I wanted to," Rhys says. Katagawa welcomes the threat like a promise. "Then do it, Atlas." Rhys catches his tongue between his canines and refuses to relent until he tastes blood, until Katagawa bleeds for the torment Rhys refuses to give voice. Rhys hears the crack of his skull as it collides with the headboard, followed by a pain so familiar and cold he shivers as it splinters into a thousand directions.

In the hungover morning, like every morning, he smokes in arrogant puffs. Tobacco is a lesser dug he's been trying and failing to become addicted to. But he's hopeful as Katagawa's blood stains the lip of his cigarette.

He meets his thirties alone in the dark like he intended. He loves to seethe there, in silence, in ego. He calls Vaughn and Yvette (by the same token.) Yvette has a girlfriend and a gun. Vaughn, suffering from a Pandoran mania, has a body count, a pasty brown complexion and a cult. They glow. They erect a candle in his honour and sing off count and off key. When it's over, they stick it in a mound of dirt to melt alone. When Yvette asks if there's a special someone in Rhys' life, he lies and tells her no. Then he drops excuses and hangs up quickly, feeling the phantom throb behind his eyes, the gritting of teeth that comes with divided attention. He can feel Jack through the wall. He feels his age, too. Jack laughs back from eternity without making a sound. Rhys wonders if he's the joke.

When the ECHOcomm cuts out he buries his face in his hands, shields it from the ribboned box on his desk that bears his name and a Hephaestion wristwatch with his initials (the kind you'd buy a long-term girlfriend or the silence of a pair of legs your wife doesn't need to know about).

For Rhys, it's a lesson in suffocation. His hands whip to his throat and with the blunt of his nails, he draws red marks down the skin of Katagawa's master plan. When he orders his best practitioners do a cleaner job of it, there is no question, no waiver, just the prompt "yes, sir" that he likes. He doesn't need to hear about the loss of range. All he needs is a guttural scream. Dead things cannot speak but the software that carries Rhys' new voice sounds just like _him_ somehow.

Rhys finds it's easier to rebuild an empire than it is to rebuild himself. He figures the arm is a good starting point: one that is Atlas red, not a slick silver sullied by a skinwalker. It goes in easier and quicker than the one he built for himself out of Hyperion's detritus. It's a sick sort of rebirth. The rest comes tumbling after: a ground floor apartment with an old-fashioned lock (the kind with a turning key), a questionable moustache, a shabby wardrobe, a contract with an assassin and an artillery of colophoned homing bullets.


End file.
